People

“I came up with the idea after reading some detective novels and watching crime shows and movies,” Mr. Liu wrote at the time. “The working title is: ‘The Beautiful Writer Who Killed.’” But what was assumed to be a fictional crime story took a turn into reality last week when Mr. Liu, 53, was arrested on accusations of bludgeoning four people to death 22 years ago.

“I know what you all expect from me and I have complied up to a point. But frankly I am tired, tired of standing up, being counted, tired of ‘having a voice’ or worse ‘being a role model,’” she writes in a new artist statement hating on artist statements, for a show opening Sept. 7 at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., in Manhattan.

“He’s appeared in Ealing dramas, a James Bond movie and played a wily dictator in Sidney Pollack’s The Interpreter. But if [Earl] Cameron never quite achieved leading-man status, that was hardly his fault – there were other factors at play. … In hindsight, perhaps, he peaked too early. He broke the mould on his very first film. Shot in 1951, Basil Dearden’s thriller Pool of London cast him as Johnny, a young sailor who battles racists at the docks and romances a white girl beside Greenwich Observatory.”

“[Ira] Aldridge’s career as an actor was exceptional, and not just for a black actor at that time. He traveled farther, was seen by audiences in more countries, and won more medals, decorations, and awards than any other actor of his century.”

“What she tried to do was to look at the children around her and have them see the potential in themselves. She was always the one they all remembered because she took it beyond the piano bench, it was right into their lives, into their school, into their social (life).”

Stage director Vincent Lancisi and his wife were vacationing in France a couple months before he was to begin work on a revival of David Henry Hwang’s Pulitzer-Prize winning play. One day, their guide/driver casually said, “I was a driver for a famous man. There is a movie about him with Jeremy Irons, called M. Butterfly.” Within an hour, Lancisi was on the phone with Bernard Boursicot; within a month, he and his lead actor were visiting Boursicot at his nursing home in Brittany.”

He was best kown for his role as TV host King Kaiser in My Favorite Year and his Oscar-nominated script for the play-turned-film Lovers and Other Strangers, part of his half-century-long collaboration with his wife, Renée Taylor.

Kirill Serebrennikov, artistic director of the cutting-edge theatre The Gogol Centre, saw his travel documents seized when he was detained and his apartment was raided in May in what authorities said was an investigation into embezzlement of state funds. Last month, his staging for the Bolshoi ballet of a full-length work about the life of Rudolf Nureyev was abruptly cancelled a few days before opening night.

Messud’s protagonists, “unusually for women in fiction, tend not to be wives or mothers. More often they’re figures who might be considered unpalatable, unattractive or — indeed — angry. Her work quietly seethes at the idea that a woman needs to be ‘likable’ — or that a man should be the judge of her likability.”

When he first arrived in the City of Brotherly Love, to attend Curtis, Lenny described it as “a city of dust and grit and horror.” And while one of those near-death experiences was metaphorical, a professional disaster, the other was real: he nearly got shot. David Patrick Stearns has the stories (and others, too).

The headlines got ahead of the actual news in this case, but here’s what the archaeologists did find: the site of an ancient city on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee that they believe was Bethsaida, named in the Gospel of John as the hometown of the apostles Peter, Andrew, and Philip.

Plath’s whole family figured she’d return to the U.S. after her marriage to Ted Hughes fell apart. She didn’t. Her reasons were several: not disrupting her children’s lives, getting child support out of Hughes, the work she was getting in London. Above them all: the experiences (and expense) she had had with the American medical system versus Britain’s National Health Service.

The classic Broadway ingenue of the 1950s and ’60s, she made her name as the original Marian the Librarian in The Music Man and Cunégonde in Leonard Bernstein’s Candide. After a difficult period of alcoholism and weight gain, she reinvented herself as a cabaret star – one of whom no less than Stephen Sondheim said, “No one sings theater songs with more feeling for the music or more understanding of the lyrics than Barbara.”

“Nakajima played [the mutant dinosaur] in the 1954 original and 11 subsequent films, donning the suit that he said weighed about 220 pounds and wreaking havoc on model cities and rival monsters. But he began his career in samurai films, including a small role in Akira Kurosawa’s legendary 1954 film Seven Samurai.”

“The sweet-voiced, guitar-picking son of a sharecropper … became a recording, television and movie star in the 1960s and ’70s, waged a publicized battle with alcohol and drugs and gave his last performances while in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.”

“Antoine Lilti’s The Invention of Celebrity is a book that does just that. A chronicle of the origins and development of our modern société du spectacle, it provides a genealogy of the media-driven world of celebrities and personalities who now dominate our headlines and crowd (out) our public debates. Far from being the product solely of 20th-century developments or the perversion of a less starstruck age, argues Lilti, the culture of celebrity has in fact been with us since the 18th century. ‘Celebrity’, Lilti writes, is ‘a characteristic trait of modern societies’. It was present at their birth.”

Talicia Martins, a 21-year-old undergraduate at Bard College, and a friend allegedly broke into three storefront businesses in Camden, Maine and stole more than $1,000. Both have been charged with burglary and felony theft.

He first got himself noticed with a provocative staging of Handel’s Clori, Tirsi e Fileno in London’s leading gay nightclub. He worked extensively at Covent Garden, San Francisco and Los Angeles Operas, Opera Theater of St. Louis, and especially Santa Fe Opera; his highest-profile project in Europe was directing a series of American musicals (in English) at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris.

“In regards to arts advocacy in general, we need to take a new approach that places the arts as a vital, engaging activity of tremendous value to Americans. Too often we approach advocacy and communication with our heads bowed and our hands out: “Please sir, can you save the arts? Can you save my organization that has been in the red for years and would you maybe consider following your state’s policy that requires arts programming in schools?” We are too timid, too afraid of offending and are perceived as impotent, ineffectual and incompetent.”

“On its face, this approach to conscientious living may look like a rejection of the uninhibited greed associated with the ’80s. But the new aspirational class shares more with its predecessors than it wants to admit. As populist surges in the United States and Europe make clear, rising economic inequality has made it more critical than ever to rethink and uproot the status quo. Yet, as Cowen and Currid-Halkett both find, for all the new elite’s well-intentioned consumption and subsequent self-assurance, they have no intention whatsoever of letting go of their status.”

“As the political crisis worsens day by day in Venezuela, the forces of resistance have found an unlikely symbol in a slight-framed 23-year-old violinist named Wuilly Arteaga. Dressed in the colors of his country, he plays his violin at the front lines of pro-democracy protests, often floating, with a pure tone and a classical vibrato, the notes of the Venezuelan national anthem while armored vehicles fill the streets and fires rage nearby. Yet as his public stature grew this summer, so did the danger facing him.”

The playwright was wildly successful, but “beyond her successes on the stage and in fiction, Aphra Behn was a Royalist spy in the Netherlands and probably South America. She also served as a political propagandist for the courts of Charles II and his unpopular brother James II.”

Long after Bronco, Hardin got in trouble with the I.R.S., and then, “while living in Prescott, Ariz., he formed an anti-tax, anti-government protest group that evolved into the Arizona Patriots militia movement, which was accused in 1986 of planning to blow up an I.R.S. complex in Utah.”

Walls and her husband left Manhattan for a 205-acre horse farm in Virginia, but “while the farm has given Ms. Walls a stability that long eluded her, she knows better than to count on it. Years of roving the country in junk cars, foraging for food in school trash bins, being pelted with rocks by bullies and being eyed with contempt by neighbors have left her wary.”

That is, when the #StarringJohnCho movement bears fruit, and he actually gets to star in a movie. “I’ve struggled with this in the last few years. Is it important for me to express my own culture, or…to be a cultureless character in a fictional America that exists only in movies and on TV? When I’m playing a character that doesn’t have an Asian surname and you don’t see their family, that’s okay, too. “

He joined the orchestra in 1953. “Mr. Dreyfus was ‘at the center of the players’ labor activism during contentious years of disputes’ in the 1960s, his son said, which resulted in a long strike and, eventually, a 52-week contract. By the time of his retirement, he’d played under Stokowski, Ormandy, Muti, and his ‘personal favorite,’ Wolfgang Sawallisch.”

The star of three movies this year, Hawkins grew up with writer/illustrator parents who have published literally hundreds of children’s books, some of which were inspired by her childhood life. Now the British actor who follows her own desires – and ignores Hollywood when it wants to put her in thrillers with Bruce Willis – is having another “breakout” year.

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